Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
It’s times like these when I’m glad I was gerrymandered out of Ohio’s 4th Congressional District. Republican Jim Jordan is a cheap labor conservative who wants to punish poor people for being poor. He claims he wants to ‘cut the deficit’ but he recently showed he still doesn’t know how food stamps work.
The Ohio Auditor of State David Yost participated in a hearing of the US House Agriculture Committee on July 6th. As I wrote in a previous post, Yost presented his ‘evidence’ of ‘fraud’ from an audit his office conducted on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka Food Stamps) in Ohio. It was obvious Yost missed the real issue with the ‘fraud’ he found and he then used his appearance in DC to raise money for a future higher office campaign.
For his testimony at the House Committee on Agriculture hearing, which was titled: “Past, Present, and Future of SNAP: Understanding Error Rates and Fraud“, David Yost wrote:
Once again a politician, setting themselves up for higher office, goes to the ‘kick a poor person’ playbook to build some conservative cred. Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, who likes to kick things conservatives like to kick – public education, for example, – is now setting his sights on the low hanging fruit of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – better known as food stamps. Yost has a funny idea of fraud that fails to match reality.
The GOP can now cross “punch a poor person” off their bucket list of asshatery when the US House passed a massive cut in food stamps on Thursday. Most used the false excuse of abuse of the system to justify taking food away from 4 million people. Some of them, claiming to be Christians, used Bible quotes as their justification. These are the same guys who never had to worry where their next meal was coming from. The GOP are so gung-ho about fraud when they can smear poor people but when their corporate buddies are robbing people blindly, the Republicans are NOWHERE to be found.
The Congress is considering a Farm Bill right now that could cut $20 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which is also known as Food Stamps. It is part of the social safety net where the government provides some help for people to buy food when they are poor or have low income. The reason for the cuts is the same tired false assumptions Republicans make about poor people. Many in the GOP claim that Food Stamps make people dependent on the government, the program is being abused, or worse that charity will cover the need. Like all GOP claims, their attack on food assistance is full of crap.